THE EXILED PRINCE SON-IN-LAW:The Empire will kneel Before Me

CH 04

Kaelen had her out of the restaurant and into a taxi in under a minute, one hand at the small of her back and the other lifted to stop the first cab on the street, and he kept his eyes on the mirror the whole ride home, tracking every pair of headlights that turned when they turned. Seraphina sat rigid beside him with her bag clutched in her lap, watching the streetlights slide over his face and saying nothing at all, and that silence worried him far more than any question she could have asked. When the cab pulled up outside their building he paid the driver, checked both ends of the road, and walked her up the stairs with his body angled between her and the street, as he had done a thousand times before in a life she knew nothing about.

She waited until the apartment door had clicked shut behind them, and then she dropped her bag on the floor and turned around.

"Who is Colonel Hobart Dane," she said, her voice low and very controlled, "and why did a man old enough to be my grandfather kneel on the floor of a restaurant and call my husband Your Royal Highness?"

"He mistook me for someone else."

"Kaelen."

"He's an old soldier, Seraphina. Old soldiers see ghosts. He looked at a stranger in a bad light and saw somebody he used to know, and I'm sorry it frightened you."

She laughed, a short, disbelieving sound with no warmth in it, and crossed the room to the window, where she stood with her back to him and her arms wrapped tightly around her ribs. For a long moment the only sound in the apartment was the rattle of the old radiator and the distant hum of the city, and when she spoke again the anger had drained out of her voice, leaving something quieter and far more painful behind.

"In the first month we knew each other, I asked whether there was anything about your past I should be afraid of. Do you remember what you said?"

He remembered. He had been standing in her tiny first apartment holding a mug of bad coffee, and he had told her that the worst thing about him was that he never learned to dance. It had made her laugh, and it had been the easiest lie he ever told.

"You said no," Seraphina went on, "and I believed you, because I wanted to and because you had never given me a reason not to. I told myself that a man who cooks when he is anxious and wakes up shouting in the night is not a man hiding something terrible. I thought you were hurt, not dishonest." She turned around, and her eyes were bright but her chin was steady. "I married you because I thought you were honest, Kaelen. Not perfect, I never needed perfect, only honest. And you just looked me in the face and told me a man weeping on his knees had made a mistake."

The words landed somewhere beneath his ribs and stayed there. He opened his mouth, and the truth rose so fast that he could almost taste it, the throne and the framing and the cold years in Ravenspire, the ring in the hidden drawer and the message that had arrived outside her father's house. But he had also seen how carefully the people hunting him chose their moments, and he knew what they did to anyone who stood close enough to be useful. If she knew everything she would become a target in full daylight, and if she knew nothing she might still be safe enough to survive it.

"There are things I can't explain yet," he said carefully. "Not because I don't trust you, but because the explanation could put you in danger."

"Danger from what?"

"I don't know yet how much of it is real."

"That is not an answer, that is a locked door with a polite sign on it." She came toward him, and the hurt in her face was so open that it was hard to look at. "I am not asking you to be a hero, Kaelen. I am asking you to stop standing on the other side of every wall and calling it protection."

The window exploded inward in a single huge crack followed by a rain of glass across the floorboards, and Kaelen moved before the first shard landed, hauling Seraphina against his chest and dropping behind the couch with his body curved around hers. A heavy object skidded across the floor and stopped against the leg of the table, and a cold wind rushed through the broken frame carrying the smell of rain and the whine of a motorcycle accelerating down the street. He counted three seconds under his breath, slid out of cover, and reached the window in a crouch just in time to see a single red taillight swing around the corner and vanish.

"Are you hurt?" he demanded, turning back, his hands already moving over her arms and shoulders. "Seraphina, look at me, are you cut anywhere?"

"I'm fine," she said, and her voice shook. "It missed me. What was it?"

It was an ordinary red brick wrapped in brown paper and bound with black twine, and before Kaelen could reach it, Seraphina was kneeling beside it with her fingers on the string. The paper fell open and a photograph slid out onto the floor, landing face up in the lamplight. It showed a young man in a dark ceremonial uniform with gold braid at the shoulder and a medal on his chest, standing very straight against a backdrop of marble columns, with a small pale scar above his left eyebrow. She looked at it, then up at her husband, and the color drained from her face.

"That's you," she whispered. "Kaelen, that is you."

He took the photograph from her hand and turned it over, and the block letters on the back were black and thick and sloped slightly to the right. STAY BURIED, OR YOUR WIFE WILL PAY FOR YOUR RETURN. Something cold and absolute settled in his chest, and in the same heartbeat a story rose to meet it, whole and smooth, the one he had kept ready for five years like a coin polished in a pocket in case this night ever came. He hated how easily it arrived.

"It looks like me because it was meant to," he said quietly. "Sit down, Seraphina, and I'll tell you the part I never could."

She sat on the arm of the couch with her hands pressed between her knees while he stood at the broken window and spoke to the dark glass. He told her that the royal guard kept a small, secret unit of young men chosen at fifteen for their height and their faces, five of them, trained to ride in motorcades and wave from balconies in the crown prince's uniform on the days when the real prince could not safely be seen. They were taught his walk and his voice, and they answered to his first name in public, and when the prince carried a scar above his eyebrow from a fall off a horse, the guard made certain that each of his shadows carried one to match.

"They cut it into me," Kaelen said, touching the mark with two fingers. "A surgeon, with a clean blade, on a Tuesday afternoon. I was fifteen."

Seraphina made a small broken sound and crossed the room in three steps. She lifted her hand to his face and traced the scar slowly, the way she had a hundred times in the dark without ever asking about it, and he felt his throat tighten. "That is why you flinch when someone touches your face without warning," she murmured. "I always thought it was something your father did."

"The prince was framed five years ago," he went on, and the rest came out low and steady. "When he fell, the guard disbanded the doubles, and within a year three of the five of us were dead, a fire, a fall, a car that left the road. We were the only ones who could swear where the prince had been on certain nights, and somebody wants that never said. I ran north and stopped being anyone. The colonel was never told which of us was the real one, and after the prince vanished he refused to believe he was gone, so he sees him in every face. Tonight, in that bad light, the face was mine."

"And the people hunting the doubles found you anyway."

"They have been closing a circle for years, and I am what is left of it."

For a long moment she simply held his face between her palms and looked at him, and her eyes filled until they spilled over. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse. "They paid you to stand in front of a bullet for a man who could not be bothered to stand there himself."

"They paid me to stand in his place so he wouldn't have to. It was never a hardship until it became a crime."

"Why did you never tell me?"

"The first rule they teach a double is that he never admits what he was," Kaelen said. "I kept it so long that I forgot I was allowed to stop."

Seraphina leaned her forehead against his chest, and he felt the shudder go through her as the last of her anger broke and drained away. He wrapped his arms around her and rested his chin against her hair, with the cold wind stirring the curtains and the faint sound of Rhys's van turning into the street below. When she lifted her head she was crying and smiling at once, her hands fisted in the front of his shirt, and she told him that there would be no more walls between them, that if he could not tell her something he should say so and she would wait, but that he must never lie to her again, not even to keep her safe.

"I promise," he said.

She kissed him then, hard and grateful, and he held her through it with his eyes open on the dark ceiling, listening to the quiet in the apartment and to the steady, merciless voice in his head. In the hidden drawer across the room lay a gold signet ring stamped with the crest of the house of Voss, a thing no double would ever have been permitted to touch, and the woman in his arms had just forgiven him for a lie with another lie wrapped inside it. She believed every word, because she loved him and had no reason in the world to doubt him, and he understood that the longer she kept believing, the more it would cost them both on the day she finally learned the truth.